Humans may engage in human-to-computer dialogs with interactive software applications referred to herein as “automated assistants” (also referred to as “chatbots,” “interactive personal assistants,” “intelligent personal assistants,” “personal voice assistants,” “conversational agents,” etc.). For example, humans (which when they interact with automated assistants may be referred to as “users”) may provide commands, queries, and/or requests (collectively referred to herein as “queries”) using spoken natural language input (i.e. utterances) which may in some cases be converted into text and then processed, and/or by providing textual (e.g., typed) natural language input.
In some cases, automated assistants may include automated assistant “clients” that are installed locally on client devices and that are interacted with directly by users, as well as cloud-based counterpart(s) that leverage the virtually limitless resources of the cloud to cooperate with automated assistant clients respond to users' requests. For example, the automated assistant client may provide, to the cloud-based counterpart(s), an audio recording of the user's voice input (or a text conversion thereof) and data indicative of the user's identity (e.g., credentials). The cloud-based counterpart may perform various processing on the input to return various results to the automated assistant client, which may then provide corresponding output to the user (or take some other action). For the sakes of brevity and simplicity, the term “automated assistant,” when described herein as “serving” a particular user, may refer to the automated assistant client installed on the particular user's client device and any cloud-based counterpart that interacts with the automated assistant client to respond to the user's queries. As used herein, the terms “task request” or “request” refer to requests to perform a task, search queries (searches for information), other queries, or any other command or statement from a user directed at an automated assistant to cause the automated assistant to respond.
An automated assistant may have access to publicly-available data such as documents and other information available on the Internet, as well as “user-controlled resources” under the control of a particular user served by the automated assistant. User-controlled resources may be associated with a “user account” of the user, and may be locally accessible from client device(s) operated by the user and/or remotely (e.g., in the so-called “cloud”). User-controlled resources may take various forms, such as a user's calendar, emails, text messages, reminders, shopping lists, search history, photos, documents, sensor data (e.g., position coordinates), content of past human-to-computer dialogs, personal preferences, and so forth.
In some cases, the automated assistant may gain access to user-controlled resources by way of the associated user account. For example, when the user installs or first engages with an automated assistant client on a particular client device, the user may grant the automated assistant permission to access some or all of the user-controlled resources. In other words, the user effectively grants the automated assistant access to user-controlled resources. In some cases, this may include modifying an access control list (or other similar security mechanism) that regulates access to the user-controlled resources.
An automated assistant that serves a first user may not have access to user-controlled resources of another user. For example, the first user may not be able to instruct an automated assistant that serves the first user to add an item to someone else's shopping list, or to determine whether someone else is available for a meeting at a particular time/location. Moreover, some tasks may require engagement by multiple users. For example, if an automated assistant serving a first user does not have access to a second user's schedule, and the first user wishes to determine whether the second user is available at a particular time/location for a meeting, the first user may be required to contact the second user (e.g., by phone or using text messaging) and the second user may confirm availability. This becomes more cumbersome if the first user wishes to schedule a meeting with multiple other users. Additionally, there is not currently a way for a first user to instruct an automated assistant serving the first user to cause an automated assistant serving a second user to proactively engage with the second user, e.g., at a particular time or location.